Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed

The story of Le Chambon transitions to an examination of the philosophy of ethics, specifically life-and-death ethics. This discussion begins by drawing a distinction between criminal and moral law. In criminal law, each side makes an argument, and a judge determines justice. This law is inherently public and helps create and preserve societal order. Moral law, or ethical law, however, is deeply personal and has no elaborate system by which to determine right and wrong. The book notes that if Trocmé and Hitler were placed in direct conversation, neither would ever convince the other of their personal sense of right and wrong. The only “court” of ethical law is individual conscience. In Le Chambon, the people individually evaluated the ethics of the official law and chose to disobey the criminal law to preserve their sense of the moral law.

The ethics at play in Le Chambon and in the Holocaust concern the preciousness and pricelessness of human life. The text notes that priceless can mean “costly” or “expensive”; conversely, it can mean “beyond any possible price.” For the Nazis, human life was potentially expensive; for the Chambonnais, human life was worth any price. Hallie relates his experience of having a heart attack while writing the book: Despite his initial sense of distance from healthy people, he began to find joy and beauty in the health of people around him and see the value in life itself.